From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch.

Ford takes a $20 billion write down on its electric vehicle business as the U.S. and the European

Union moved to water down their clean car mandates.

But California regulators, on the other hand,

refuse to quit subsidizing a solar thermal electricity plant

even after it proves not to be cost competitive.

Welcome, I'm Kyle Peterson with the Wall Street Journal.

We're joined today by my colleague on the editorial page,

columnist Alicia Finley.

It's been a rough year for the subsidized business of selling electric cars. Big news story from Detroit before the holidays being that

Ford is now taking a $19.5 billion charge related to its electric vehicle businesses.

CEO Jim Farley said this instead of plowing billions into the future, knowing these large

EVs will never make money, we are pivoting, unquote.

Here's a bit more of what Jim Farley told Bloomberg TV.

It was really the customer changing their decision.

You know, we saw hybrids really take off last couple years, like,

you know, last month about, well, we had 30% increase in our hybrid sales. We're now number

three in our, I think we're 80% hybrid market share in trucks. So we saw this happening. We also

saw the more expensive EVs, you know, really suffer in the market and the more affordable

EVs to do better.

And then the last couple months really was remarkable.

The EV market in the U.S. went from 12% in the industry to only five.

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